Kent Hoover

The Environmental Protection issued final regulations defining what bodies of water would be subject to Clean Water Act permitting requirements, upsetting business groups that contend the rule will expand federal control over how land is used.

The EPA contends the Clean Water Rule simply provides more precise definitions are what types of waters are subject to federal regulation. This should streamline Clean Water Act permitting, it contends.

“For the water in the rivers and lakes in our communities that flow to our drinking water to be clean, the streams and wetlands that feed them need to be clean too,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy

Under the rule, tributaries and headwaters that show physical features of flowing water — a bed, bank and high-water mark — would be subject to the Clean Water Act. So would waters that are next to rivers and lakes and their tributaries. Ditches that are constructed out of streams or function like streams and can carry pollution downstream also would be covered. But ditches that flow only when it rains wouldn’t be covered, according to the EPA.

Business groups, however, contend the rule is broader than the EPA describes. They vow to fight it in the courts and in Congress. Earlier this month,the House passed legislation that would require the EPA to withdraw the rule, which was dubbed the “Waters of the United States” rule before the EPA rebranded it.

“This has the potential to bring local development to a stop and make it much more difficult for small businesses to make even minor improvements to their properties,” said Dan Danner, president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business. “It gives the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers new power to regulate local projects and local business operations, and it creates for the trial lawyers and the environmental activists a whole new class of potential defendants.”

The National Association of Home Builders contends the would rule would increase housing costs and add regulatory burdens to landowners.

Neil Mackkinnon

While Juneau is working on its economic development plan, the federal government is back at adopting costly and burdensome new regulations at the expense of sustainable growth. By redefining the “waters of the United States,” the federal government is vastly expanding its authority over Alaska.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are proposing a rule that will greatly expand the federal Clean Water Act and federal overreach in Alaska. Under the Clean Water Act, those agencies have authority to protect navigable waters of the United States. The new rule would classify lands as waters of the United States because, if at any point in the year any water overflows that land, it can be regulated as if it were water. This rule would bring seasonal streams, ponds, ditches, depressions in fields, and large puddles under these agencies’ Clean Water Act jurisdiction.

For small businesses or subdivision developers, the change in jurisdiction could prevent the use of property or at the very least add tremendously expensive permitting processes to the use of property. The new federal control could mean owners would not be allowed to alter land formations, which prevents landowners from digging or excavation on their property, or even laying gravel.

In Juneau, the new definition will affect nearly every potential new housing site. It is doubtful there are any developable housing sites in Juneau that don’t have depressions that overflow during the year. Thus our attempt to increase available housing in Juneau can expect another federal roadblock, just as the state and the borough are reviewing and removing their unnecessary roadblocks.

The Juneau Economic Development Plan calls for the development of West Douglas to provide areas for business and housing growth. The proposed new federal rules pose a huge roadblock to that development. In addition to the many other existing challenges, we will be burdened with decisions created in Washington, D.C., with their “one-size-fits-all” attitude impact on our growing state and community.

It is possible to get permits, but the cost is high and prohibitive to many small businesses that are attempting to subdivide and build new homes. A recent U.S. Supreme Court case cited the average cost of a permit to be $270,000. Violating the regulations is punishable by fines up to $37,500 per day — a substantial risk for any business, especially a small one.

The cost of regulation is more devastating to small businesses than to the larger businesses. A recent study by the American Action Forum shows that for every 10 percent increase in regulatory costs in an industry, the number of small and medium-size businesses falls 3 to 6 percent. The number of large businesses, meanwhile, grows 2 to 3 percent. Thus this proposal by the EPA is also highly regressive.

The federal Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy called on the EPA to withdraw the rule. It pointed out that the agency failed to perform an economic analysis as required by the law. EPA brushed aside that recommendation, arguing that there won’t be any new costs because the new rule merely expands an existing regulation, again showing the federal appetite to expand its overreach with callousness.

Congress is attempting to reel in the EPA with legislation, S 1140, cosponsored by Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan and HR 1732, the Regulatory Integrity Protection Act of 2015. It would provide relief by sending the EPA and Corps of Engineers back to the drawing board on its problematic Waters of the United States new rule.

Let us not forget that Alaska has a Department of Environmental Conservation and local planning and development ordinances. These work well to balance the need to protect our environment and our need to grow our economy. For the long term, Juneau needs to provide more available housing and a broader range of jobs if our community is to prosper.

• Neil MacKinnon is a member of the First Things First Alaska Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the economic viability and future of Alaska by recognizing the benefits of responsible economic development and natural resource management.

By Ruth Marcus, May 1, 2015

Click here to read online

Today’s topic is toxic substances and the appalling gaps in the current law that is supposed to protect the public from dangerous chemicals.

For example, before a new chemical enters the market, the manufacturer must demonstrate its safety and the substance must win approval from federal regulators, right?

Not even close.

When it comes to new medications, the Food and Drug Administration conducts a rigorous review. Same for pesticides and the Environmental Protection Agency. But chemicals — even chemicals used in everyday household products — are presumed safe until proven otherwise. Companies don’t even have to test chemicals before using them in consumer products.

Not only that: The EPA, which is responsible for overseeing chemical safety, is all but toothless even when serious questions are raised about substances already in use. If you think this is hyperbole, consider the example of asbestos, classified as a “known human carcinogen.” It’s banned, right?

Nope.

In 1989, after studying the issue for 10 years and concluding that asbestos posed “an unreasonable risk to human health,” the EPA moved to prohibit most products that contain asbestos. Two years later, it was shot down by a federal appeals court, which concluded that the agency had overstepped its authority.

Since then, the EPA has not proposed regulating a single additional toxic substance. Not a single one, despite the emerging evidence that an alphabet soup of chemical substances — BPA in plastic baby bottles, PFCs in nonstick surfaces for pans, PBDEs in flame retardants for furniture — collect in the human body and are linked to health problems, particularly in children.

The fundamental difficulty, and the reason I’m writing about this topic today, is the ineffectiveness of a 1976 law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, that was supposed to regulate such materials. When the law was passed, some 60,000 chemicals were listed as being in use in household or industrial products. Since then, the EPA has only been able to require testing on just over 200; only five have been banned or even restricted.

When the toxic substances law was passed, the prevalent scientific thinking was that, unlike pharmaceuticals or pesticides that are at risk of being ingested, chemical compounds are not intended to be biologically active and therefore not likely to cause harm. That has turned out to be dangerously incorrect.

“We now know that hundreds of chemicals have properties of concern to human health. And, moreover, we have evidence that we are being exposed to them in ways that we were not decades ago,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Here’s the good news: An astonishing bipartisan coalition of senators, assembled by David Vitter (R-La.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.), is pushing an overhaul of the law, the culmination of a decade-long effort launched by the late senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.).

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved it last week by a vote of 15 to 5. When Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) agree on something beyond what to name a post office, that’s an achievement.

The confluence of interests that produced this progress stems from the ramped-up activity of state regulators in the absence of federal oversight, and the chemical industry’s preference for a federal rule rather than patchwork, and potentially more burdensome, state edicts.

But this impetus for action also reflects the biggest disagreement over the proposal — over the degree to which the federal law would preempt state regulation. This dispute has split the environmental movement and spurred the environment panel’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Barbara Boxer(Calif.), not only to vote against the measure in committee but to threaten a filibuster on the floor.

The chemical industry would prefer to have a federal law that entirely preempts state regulation. The compromise worked out by Vitter and Udall would allow existing state protections against hazardous chemicals to remain in place; states would remain free to impose additional regulations unless and until the EPA decided to launch a review.

Not perfect but about as good as it is going to get with a Republican Congress that isn’t disappearing anytime soon. Meanwhile, as with the blowup of climate change legislation in 2009, congressional failure now could mean no action for years.

“The risks are substantial that we will likely lose the best opportunity we’ve had in a generation,” said the defense fund’s Denison. Then, he said, “we go back to a status quo that everybody agrees is a failure.”

And that would be truly appalling.

By EPW Chairman Jim Inhofe, , April 22, 2015

Click here to read online

If there was ever any doubt that the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan is an energy policy plan, not a carbon reduction plan, all you have to do is look at how they treat nuclear energy.

Nuclear is our largest source of carbon-free energy, generating over  60% of our carbon-free electricity. Surely President Barack Obama's climate plan, allegedly aimed at reducing the United States' overall carbon emissions, would revitalize the nuclear industry, lead to increased plant construction and help meet aggressive carbon reduction targets. Well, think again.

James Hansen, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in 2013that "continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity's ability to avoid dangerous climate change."

Yet Wednesday, the White House will celebrate Earth Day and promote its work to fend off climate change, while strategically ignoring its largest tool to cut carbon emissions -- nuclear energy -- as well as the warning of one of the administration's favorite climate scientists.

Despite the fact that nuclear power is carbon-free, the Obama administration's energy policy plan is biased against it. This bias is created by how Environmental Protection Agency credits nuclear power in its models of both current emissions and plan implementation. EPA's modeling is divorced from reality.

First, EPA's "Base Case for the Proposed Clean Power Plan" purports to depict the current state of the industry as the future would unfold without the Clean Power Plan. This base case assumes no new nuclear construction and indicates the retirement of 96 of our 99 operating nuclear plants by 2050.

EPA's implementation modeling, "Option 1 -- State," shows exactly the same situation: no new construction and 96 retirements by 2050. In other words, EPA assumes that the nuclear industry is essentially phased out by 2050.

These assumptions are tremendously important because they determine how emission targets are set and what state actions will receive credit toward those targets. A group of University of Tennessee graduate students made this point to EPA at a public hearing last summer.

Using EPA's own data, the graduate students showed that EPA's energy policy plan creates incentives for states to shut down nuclear power plants and replace them with natural gas combined cycle plants. The students demonstrated that under this scenario, EPA's model shows emission reductions while real world emissions actually increase.

President Obama's EPA has shifted its position on nuclear energy and hidden that policy shift in a model.

For example, when EPA modeled the Lieberman-Warner bill in 2008, the agency indicated 44 nuclear plants would need to be built by 2030 in order to achieve the carbon reductions mandated in the bill. EPA's modeling of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill showed the need to build 275 new nuclear plants by 2050 to meet the carbon reduction targets in the legislation.

Where did this policy shift come from?

At a recent hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, Mary Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, told Congress that EPA looked at California's California Global Warming Solutions Act when developing its so-called Clean Power Plan and that EPA's plan adopts the same policy choices -- limited credit for either nuclear or hydropower -- both of which are carbon-free.

Thus, EPA is assuming legislative powers and is making policy choices that favor some forms of carbon-free energy over others.

Congress did not give EPA the authority to make these choices, so instead they have hidden them in the modeling.

For example, the same modeling that assumes the nuclear energy phaseout coincidentally shows robust development of renewables without any retirements between now and 2050. This is a very favorable assumption albeit unlikely considering wind turbines and solar panels are commonly believed to last only 20 to 30 years before needing replacement.

This anti-nuclear bias also is evident in Obama's recent executive order "Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade," which directs agencies to reduce their carbon emissions. Even though existing nuclear plants generate carbon-free electricity, the executive order does not allow agencies to take credit for emission reduction from nuclear energy unless it is energy from small modular reactors.

While I have long fought back on attempts for the federal government to tax carbon, I believe in an all-of-the-above energy strategy that provides our nation with energy security, and I have supported legislation that helps to clean the air. The administration says it shares these same interests, despite differing avenues to get there. The administration also believes in man-driven global warming, which should make nuclear energy its golden key.

But the Clean Power Plan and the President's recent executive order demonstrate that the Obama administration is neither serious about reducing carbon emissions nor pursuing an all-of-the-above energy strategy.

If you think this administration supports nuclear energy, think again.